The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (190721).Volume IX. From Steele and Addison to Pope and Swift.

XIV. Scottish Popular Poetry before Burns.

§ 14. Sir John Clerk and George Halkett.

Sir John Clerk, of Penicuik, is the reputed author of Merry may the Maid be that Marries the Miller, which first appeared in 1752 in The Charmer, a volume of partly Scots and partly English verse, edited by I. Gair, the first edition of which appeared in 1749. George Halkett, schoolmaster of Rathen, Aberdeenshire, is credited by Peter Buchan with the authorship of Logie OBuchan, which appeared c. 1730, in a broadside, and a Jacobite ballad Wherry Whigs Awa, included in Hoggs Jacobite Relics, but termed by Hogg a confused ballad, the greater part of the twenty copies in his possession being quite different from one another, and visibly composed at different periods and by different hands. Halkett, it is also supposed, may have been the author of the Dialogue between the Devil and George II, which caused the duke of Cumberland, in 1746, to offer a reward of £100 for the author, living or dead. Halketts Occasional Poems on Various Subjects, published in 1727, strongly militate against Buchans statements, even if Wherry Whigs Awa, in the extended fashion printed by Hogg, existed in the time of Halkett. Logie OBuchan may well, however, have been a veiled Jacobite ballad, lamenting the fortunes of the old pretender.